layervault:

LayerVault’s file page is its most heavily used page, and as such it deserves the greatest amount of scrutiny. We’ve actually released at least 3 versions of the timeline since our first early beta — and even more updates to the file page. Here’s what we’ve learned and what we’ve changed.

In the timeline’s first version, points were equidistant from one another, and we used a scrollbar metaphor. That made it rather difficult to figure out where to click. We thought we could do better.

So, in the second version, we went to the other extreme — versions were positioned on the timeline as clickable points. It turned out that we were focusing too much on precision, and it was leading to a bad experience. Watch the video above and you’ll see what we mean. For users like myself, who save every few seconds, it wasn’t a great experience.

In the latest iteration, precision isn’t as important as presenting a general idea of how far things are from each other. Long time spans have been truncated with a “…”. There’s a zoomed-out view (that clock icon) that you can use to jump to any point in the timeline.

We’re not quite done yet on this page, but I think we’ve definitely come a long way. It really helps that we use LayerVault daily, religiously. We have a keen sense of what works and doesn’t, and it’s pretty quickly apparent. More to come soon.